Sports Poets Society

Illustration by João Fazenda https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/22/duck-cover-and-pass-the-atomic-bowl A former Crawdaddy editor produced a documentary on a peculiar postwar military football game in Nagasaki. THE NEW YORKER -  September 15, 2025 By Zach Helfand Published in the print edition of the  September 22, 2025 , issue, with the headline “Duck, Cover, and Pass.” FALLOUT DEPT. In 1972, Greg Mitchell was an editor at Crawdaddy , the proto-rock magazine, when someone called his desk. “It was some fast-talking manager, who said, ‘I’ve got this hot act. We’re getting a big press entourage, taking you all up to Sing Sing prison,’ ” Mitchell recalled. The act was playing for the inmates to début his new band. “I thought, Well, I don’t care about this guy, but I get to go to Sing Sing,” Mitchell said. He and Peter Knobler , the magazine’s editor-in-chief, rode along in the band’s van. The manager was Mike Appel . The act was Bruce Springsteen . Nobody el...

https://artsfuse.org/313555/documentary-film-review-the-atomic-bowl-the-catastrophic-game-is-still-on/ The at times chilling narrative of The Atomic Bowl raises probing and vexing questions about why we continue to face the threat of nuclear peril today. The Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero – and Nuclear Peril Today.   Directed by Greg Mitchell.  Narrated by Peter Coyote.  Produced by Lyn Goldfarb.  Streaming at PBS.org and via PBS apps and public TV stations on July 12.  Broadcast on New Hampshire PBS  on August 4 and 7, 2025. A scene from the documentary The Atomic Bowl. July 8, 2025 -  Arts Fuse   By Robert Israel Nagasaki, destroyed by the second atomic bomb dropped by the United States on August 9, 1945 — three days after the atomic destruction of Hiroshima — is the subject of Greg Mitchell’s engrossing and insightful documentary film. Broken into succinct chapters that explore the city’s history before and after the bombing, The Atomic...

Original title: “In 1946, German POWs awaiting repatriation played football against each other in Stockton, California. Organized by American military officials, the game became known as the Barbed Wire Bowl.” Subreddit: /r/NFL Post date: June 9, 2018 This isn’t related to the NFL in particular, but I thought it was an interesting-enough story to share during this offseason. Football. It’s about as American as apple pie, bald eagles, and killing Nazis, right? Well, what about Nazis playing football? After World War II, American troops overseeing German prisoners of war proposed an interesting way for their prisoners to pass the time until they were sent home: a game of football. This was the Barbed Wire Bowl. With World War II coming to a close, American military officials pondered what to do with German prisoners of war staying in camps located in the United States. At the Stockton Ordnance Depot in California, Colonel Kenneth M. Barager had an interesting idea: before repatriating th...

https://gregmitchell.substack.com/p/the-atomic-bowl-football-on-a-killing Greg Mitchell Jan 01, 2024 Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including “ Hiroshima in America ,” “ Atomic Cover-up ” (on sale now for $1.99 as an ebook) and the recent award-winning “ The Beginning or the End : How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” He has directed three documentary films since 2021 for PBS (including “ Atomic Cover-up” ) . He has written about the atomic bombings for over forty years.  The famed biologist Jacob Bronowski revealed in 1964 that his classic study Science and Human Values was born at the moment he arrived in Nagasaki in November 1945, three months after the atomic bombing (which killed at least 75,000 civilians ) with a British military mission sent to study the effects of the new weapon. Arriving by jeep after dark, he found a landscape as desolate as the craters of the moon. That moment, he wrote, “is present to me as I write, as ...

Feature photo courtesy of the National Archives. https://lithub.com/the-poet-who-watched-a-football-game-on-nagasakis-atomic-killing-field/ Greg Mitchell on William W. Watt’s Experience in the Aftermath of Nuclear Devastation “Nagasaki was an embarrassment to the art of war.”    – Don DeLillo, End Zone Via PBS Greg Mitchell  - August 8, 2025 One of the most disturbing sporting events in history took place on January 1, 1946, when the US military staged an all-star football game on a field in Nagasaki, Japan—less than five months after an atomic bomb killed over 70,000 in that city , nearly all of them civilians . The game, dubbed “The Atomic Bowl,” was played on the same day that college football bowl games were being played in the US. Today, nearly 80 years to the day after the bombings, the first vivid letters about the game and its aftermath, along with several previously unpublished images, have emerged from an unexpected source: William W. Watt , a revered English li...

Mother Jones illustration; National Archives https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/08/nuclear-football-in-nagasaki/ The Atomic Bowl was a football game that was played in the ruins of Nagasaki on January 1, 1946. Politics August 4, 2025 Greg Mitchell Bio Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. On New Year’s Day, 1946, one of the most surreal and disturbing sporting events in US history was held in the Japanese city of Nagasaki, less than five months after an atomic bomb on August 9 destroyed half the city and killed at least 75,000 people. The all-star football game, staged by the occupying forces of the US military, received wide coverage in the American media at the time and was dubbed the Atomic Bowl. Then it became largely forgotten, almost lost to history. As we approach the 80th anniversary of this attack, this game remains an appropriate metaphor for the Nagasaki bomb, the second nuclear weapon dropped on a large Japanese city by the United ...

https://gregmitchphoto.com/atomicbowl/ “The Atomic Bowl,” PBS Film and Book, August 2025 “Explores the legacy and the continuing threat of nuclear war.”    — The Washington Post Now streaming via PBS.org and PBS apps and airing on local stations >>>”Atomic Bowl” book published, more here<<< Watch the film now via PBS.org or watch via Vimeo or on PBS stations, updated list at bottom of page Written and directed by Greg Mitchell. / Producer: Lyn Goldfarb Narrator: Peter Coyote. / Contact: epic1934@aol.com “A great movie–a hidden chapter in atomic history revealed.” — Jayne Loader, co-director of The Atomic Cafe “Today’s nuclear tensions make Mitchell’s storytelling more timely than ever.” — Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer “Fascinating. Poor Nagasaki got lost because it was the second bombing.”— Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize winner for The Making of the Atomic Bomb “A master storyteller and urgent reminder of the terrors of nuclear war. Nece...